


Anata wa kanojo o shitte imashita ka? (The woman who gave birth to me)

by stereden



Series: Watashitachi wa Roger kaizoku desu [4]
Category: One Piece
Genre: Because Sharing is Caring, Bitter!Buggy, Buggy tells Ace about Roger and Rouge, Buggy was a Roger Pirate too, Competent!Buggy, Feels, Gen, I REGRET NOTHING, and Ace deserves to have the full picture, and he's trying to be objective for Ace, anon gave me more Buggy feels and now i'm inflicting them back on you, because they were human and faillible and not perfect but not evil either, but slightly less than in Watashitachi wa Roger kaizoku desu, i will make that tag a thing or die trying, mostly because the other Roger Kaizoku are not around for him to focus on, small cameo by Shanks at the end, swearing and alcohol, the good the bad and the in between, this is all anon's fault, what if Buggy had recognised Ace earlier in my Watashitachi wa Roger kaizoku desu verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-09-02 22:53:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16796290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stereden/pseuds/stereden
Summary: Childbirth? Blackjack D Rouge died in childbirth? How? Her crew had that terrifying doctor, and at least a couple islands with decent hospitals under their protection! Buggy knows childbirth is dangerous, knows women still die of it today, but fuck. He calls bullshit.But not in front of the boy who clearly blames himself for his mother’s death. Contrary to other people’s frequent claims, Buggy does know the meaning of tact.“My condolences,” he says instead, bowing his head. “She was a great woman. Terrifying, too. Don’t get me wrong, she was definitely badass with a staff and had a mean habit of going for the crotch with the damn thing, but she was one lady I quickly learned not to cross after that first time. Captain never learnt that lesson, though. It was hilarious, watching her kick his ass whenever he got on her ner…”Buggy pauses. Takes another look at the boy hanging to his every word. Forces himself to see past the freckles, and the curls. Imagines a moustache instead, and slightly darker hair.Fuck.Fuck.Fuck!“...ves,” he finishes, then downs the rest of his bottle and reaches for the next one. “She was completely out of his league, of course.”





	Anata wa kanojo o shitte imashita ka? (The woman who gave birth to me)

**Author's Note:**

> This is all Anon's fault for sending me this:
> 
> "First of all fuck you for giving my buggy feels and changing how I look at him... and secondly bc of your latest chapter I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if buggy when he was testing ace realised who he was, would he tell shanks or just him really vague suggestions"
> 
> Because then I started thinking about it. And now it's three in the morning and i've written 3383 words of this and here I am, inflicting more Buggy feels on you all
> 
> Title is from google translate so please correct me if you actually speak Japanese, and is supposed to say "Did you know her? (The woman who gave birth to me)"

In one life, Buggy wouldn’t have met Portgas D. Ace and realized he was his captain’s son until the battle of Marineford, until it was too late.

In another, Buggy would have met him before he left East Blue, and before Ace met his crew. Buggy would have challenged the rookie, like he does with every other rookie who crosses his way, to make sure they realise what they’re getting into, and Buggy would have gotten his ass kicked and written Portgas D Ace down as a future monster. Buggy would have let him go, and he wouldn’t have realised that this was Gol D Roger’s son until Marineford. Not quite too late, not in that life, but still not upon his first meeting.

In this life, though, Buggy meets Portgas D. Ace before he leaves East Blue, and before he eats the Mera Mera no Mi but after the creation of the Spades. The crew is still a small one, only three people and their captain, but they seem strong enough to get cocky.

Cockiness gets people killed out on the sea, Buggy knows that too well, and they’re young, their captain not even eighteen yet, so Buggy does what he always does when he comes across rookies: he makes a scene, and starts a fight.

It’s a combination of elements that tips him off. It’s the name and the name of the crew and this boy with freckles and curls and the hair is the wrong colour but it falls over his face in the same way and he fights with a pipe and not a staff, but for a second Buggy is thrown back in time and sees a woman with blond curls and freckles and a staff and a D. in her name and he falters. Takes a step back, surprising his opponent who stops just shy of hitting him.

“Why did no one tell me that that menace reproduced?!” Buggy gapes, pointing at Ace, whose face turns murderous.

The boy looks like he wants to kill him, but Buggy is used to people reacting like that and also is very much not over the fact that Blackjack D. Rouge had had a child and that said kid had been let loose on the oceans. You would think _someone_ would have sent out a warning, sea damn it!

“I did not sign up to piss that woman off again!” Buggy proclaims loudly, waving his arms in front of his body as if to protect himself. “Nope, did that once way back then, never again!”

Portgas - and fuck, really, he should have noticed, but Rouge always went by Blackjack back then and he hadn’t made the link and now he couldn’t unsee it - who had been ready smash his head in with that pipe of his, freezes in his tracks.

“Woman?” He repeats, voice unsteady. “You knew my mother?”

“Knew her? Knew her?” Buggy snorts. “Used to meet up with her crew every few months back in the days. What the hell is she up to these days? Last I heard she’d retired, but like hell a woman like Blackjack D. Rouge would retire quietly!”

“Blackjack D. Rouge? She was a pirate?”

Buggy wants to gape, but winces instead. Oh. Past tense. Shit.

But also, how the hell did the kid not know that about his mother? The woman had been _infamous_ , one of the big names of that Era, right there with Gol D Roger, Shiki the Golden Lion and Edward “Whitebeard” Newgate!

Buggy puts his knives away. This takes precedence to testing the rookie (beside, if he’s Rouge’s son, then he’s monster quality anyway).

“Tell me you’ve got some alcohol on board,” he tells the boy. “I’m not talking about any of this sober.”

Buggy might have been _terrified_ of Blackjack D. Rouge as a child, but he had respected the fuck out of her and there is no way, no way in _hell_ that he is going to let her son remain ignorant of her history.

If only because he honest to Davy Jones believes that she would fight her way out of Davy Jones’ locker to kick his ass if he did.

(She would. She really, really would, and Buggy is not taking the risk, no thank you!)

* * *

Five minutes later, Buggy is sitting on the deck of the Piece of Spadille, alone with the ship’s captain while the rest of the crew are off to restock, and Portgas is thrusting a bottle of rum at him.

“Tell me about her!” The boy orders him, and Buggy would take offence to it if the kid didn’t look so desperate to know anything about his mother.

Shit. That means he was too young to remember her when she died. And that whoever took care of him after that didn’t tell him anything about Rouge, if he didn’t even know that she had been a pirate.

Fuck. Buggy takes a swig. He is _not_ doing this sober.

“So. Portgas D. Rouge. Or, as we all knew her back then, Blackjack D. Rouge, Queen of Spades, captain of the Blackjack pirates on the Black Maria. She was one of the big names of the era, I can’t believe no one told you about that.”

“She died when I was born,” Portgas bites out, teeth clenched. “That’s all I know about her.”

Childbirth? Blackjack D Rouge died in childbirth? _How?_ Her crew had that terrifying doctor, and at least a couple islands with decent hospitals under their protection! Buggy knows childbirth is dangerous, knows women still die of it today, but fuck. He calls bullshit.

But not in front of the boy who clearly blames himself for his mother’s death. Contrary to other people’s frequent claims, Buggy does know the meaning of tact.

“My condolences,” he says instead, bowing his head. “She was a great woman. Terrifying, too. Don’t get me wrong, she was definitely badass with a staff and had a mean habit of going for the crotch with the damn thing, but she was one lady I quickly learned not to cross after that first time. Captain never learnt that lesson, though. It was _hilarious_ , watching her kick his ass whenever he got on her ner…”

Buggy pauses. Takes another look at the boy hanging to his every word. Forces himself to see past the freckles, and the curls. Imagines a moustache instead, and slightly darker hair.

Fuck.

Fuck.

Fuck!

“...ves,” he finishes, then downs the rest of his bottle and reaches for the next one. “She was completely out of his league, of course.”

Portgas D. Ace stills. Stiffens.

(Or is it Gol D. Ace?)

(Fuck.)

“What crew were you on back then?” the boy asks, trying for nonchalant and failing spectacularly.

Buggy snorts. Takes another gulp of rum.

“You don’t want me to answer this, kid. Trust me.”

* * *

Fuck. This is Captain’s kid. Captain somehow managed to convince Blackjack D. Rouge that he was worth her time, probably after Raftel, after disbanding the crew and abandoning them, got her pregnant, and then handed himself in to the marines. Left her behind to bear their child and - _fuck._

Baterilla.

Baterilla hadn’t been one of the Blackjack’s officially protected islands, but Buggy remembers Rouge mentioning that she had been born in South Blue, and the marines had been looking for pregnant women on Baterilla after Captain’s death, confining everyone on the island while they ‘investigated’. He and Shanks had tried to get there and get people out but by the time they got there it had been too late. Dozens of young children, babies just days old, had been killed, as had many pregnant mothers, and the marines had made all the evidence disappear by blaming it on bandits and pirates and mad scientists.

Regular childbirth was dangerous enough, but it wouldn’t have killed Rouge, not on its own, not if she had had her crew to take care of her. But she had separated from her crew shortly before the execution, if Buggy remembers correctly, to visit her homeland for a while from what Yadomaru, the Blackjacks’ first mate, had told him when he had seen her at Loguetown. If she had been stuck on Baterilla during the purge, if she had had to hide the pregnancy… Portgas was too young to have been born in the nine months following Captain’s death. If Rouge had somehow managed to extend her pregnancy for that long, without a doctor to oversee her care… Fuck.

Fuck!

He can’t deal with this. Not on his own.

* * *

Buggy takes another gulp of rum. He’s not feeling even slightly dizzy. The succession of painful realisations are doing wonders to keep him sober.

“What if I do want you to answer?” The kid is glaring at him, and ouch, he definitely inherited his glare from his mother and Buggy has to suppress a wince.

Buggy could lie. Could use smoke and mirror and talk his way out, make up a fictional captain with a crush on the unobtainable Blackjack D. Rouge.

But this is Rouge’s son ( _and she will come back from the grave to haunt him)_.

But this is Captain’s son ( _and he thinks he shouldn’t have been born, he thinks that Roger was the scum of Earth and that he was the devil incarnate and_ fuck _, but Buggy can’t let that stand_.)

(He owes it to them both.)

(He might hate Captain for abandoning ~~him~~ them, but he also loved the man like the father he never had which is why it still hurts and he can’t let this boy go on thinking that.)

* * *

He downs the rest of his second bottle in one go.

“Then I would tell you that I sailed with a crew of crazy people who took the world by the storm, who were fucking _monsters_ in how powerful they were, who could be good and could be bad depending on the point of view. I would tell you that the years I spent with them were both the best and the worst years of my life. That I was terrified out of my wits most of the time, because they were reckless and sought out danger because they were bored and forgot that they had cabin boys who hadn’t quite hit the double digits yet, but that I also admired the fuck out of them. That our captain was a _moron_ , a stupid, happy-go-lucky moron who did whatever he wanted and fuck whoever tried to stop him, a man who would have fought to the death for any of us just like we would have for him, but also a man who didn’t know when to _not_ fight, not even when our lives were in danger and retreating would have been the smart thing to do.”

(Edd War at ten and no stop he doesn’t want to think about it much less talk about it not now not here)

He takes a breath, continues.

(Because he’s probably the first person who can tell the kid who his parents really were, not how the world remembers them)

(Rayleigh and the others would probably paint Roger in a much better light, to counter the Marine propaganda that the kid probably grew up on, but Buggy won’t. Because that’s not all of who Roger had been, and Buggy, by the end, had been painfully aware that his captain had been _human_ . A monster of a fighter, sure, with a temper to match and the preservation instinct of a squirrel on drugs, but also human and _faillible_. Not just the great adventurer, the free man and the great captain that the others remember.)

(So here Buggy is, being honest. More honest than he has ever been to anyone save Shanks, more honest than he will ever be again, but fuck if the kid doesn’t deserve it.)

(Buggy’s sperm donor had been a bastard and his mother had not been much better, but at least Buggy knows about them.)

“I would tell you that I loved my captain and hate him just as much, that he was the kind of man who slaughtered _an army_ over a perceived insult to our crew but refused to step down in the face of a challenge even if it meant risking all our lives. I would tell you that he had the worst pick-up lines in all the oceans and that he got thrown overboard for them more than once when he tried them on women. I would tell you that he was the man who took one look at two starving gutter rats and took them on his ship and gave them a new life, and that he was the man who conquered all the seas and then more, and still didn’t stop.”

The kid is staring at him, face ashen, and Buggy reaches for the next bottle, unstops it with his teeth and takes a gulp.

“I would tell you that none of us expected him to suddenly tell us that this was it, this was as far as we would go together, that he was _leaving_ and that the crew was officially _disbanded_. I would tell you that he had been sick for years, and that there had been nothing our Doctor could do, and that he had only a couple of years left to live and that he decided to spend them with someone else. I would tell you that maybe he thought he was protecting that someone else when he gave himself up, but that I still think that he did it because he couldn’t stand the idea of wasting away in his sickbed and wanted to go out in a burst of glory. I would tell you that I watched as they killed him and that I will never forgive him for that.”

He stops then, because everything he just said is _true_ , but it’s the first time he’s saying the words, the first time he’s actually _telling_ someone what it was like back then and remembering _hurts._

(Shanks doesn’t count, because Shanks had been _there_ , had lived through it with him even if his perspective had been different because Shanks had always been a monster-in-the-making, but Shanks had suffered just as much as Buggy after Captain left, after Loguetown, and they don’t _talk_ about it, not unless there’s a lot of alcohol at hand and often not even then, but that’s okay because they don’t need the words. They know.)

“I would tell you that he was and wasn’t what the world made him out to be. That he was bigger than life but also very human. And humans aren’t perfect. They make mistakes. Sometimes, they make really fucking big mistakes and others are left to pay the price and that’s not fair.”

* * *

He drinks the last of the rum, then puts the bottle down. The kid is still staring, and there’s something like shell-shock and heartbreak on his face and fuck, Buggy is bad at this.

“If you want to know more about Rouge,” he says, because that’s all he can think of right now and the kid looks like he needs to process what he just heard and is in no state to hear anything more about Roger. “You might want to track down Yadomaru Lisa. Or any of the Blackjacks, really. Last I heard, some of them had opened a bar on a island near Water 7 and they all stick around there,” because the Blackjacks had stayed together despite their captain’s disappearance, had closed ranks and protected each other and no, Buggy is not jealous, he’s not and fuck do they even know that Rouge is dead? - “So they’re your best bet if you want to hear some stories from people who actually lived with her.”

He pause, takes a breath and a risk.

“And if you want to hear more about that crew I was in, that captain I followed for five years and waited for for two more, feel free to find me. I usually stick to East Blue - learnt my lesson about getting in over my head early on. Hell, I even have a Den-Den Mushi.”

The kid still isn’t moving, or reacting, or _anything_ , and Buggy gulps, but he has to say this ( _even if this is Captain’s son and Buggy doesn’t want to, but he has to and)_

“And if you want me to leave, and never bother you again, then I will. If you want me to never again speak a single word to you, then I will.”

It would tear him apart to do so, because this is captain’s son, but he would. He would stay away if Ace asked him to, because this is Ace’s choice to make. It’s obvious that the boy has issues with being Gol D. Roger’s legacy, and hell, Buggy can more than understand that. If anyone knew about him… Buggy shudders.

Roger’s enemies have never shied away from hurting kids.

(Two years on his own with Shanks, and three all by himself, five years running from people who had a grudge against a dead man, and fucking _Baterilla_ had taught him that.)

(And Shanks, fuck, he needs to tell Shanks about this, because Shanks had been _there_ , right there with him, had seen the aftermath of the Baterilla purges and hasn’t been sober since and fuck, Buggy needs to see Shanks right now because _Buggy can’t deal with this_.)

“I… I don’t know.”

It’s the first thing Ace has said since Buggy started talking about Roger. The kid looks like his entire worldview has been flipped upside down.

Buggy can commiserate, he feels exactly the same.

(He really, really needs to talk to Shanks.)

He sighs.

“Look, kid. None of us were expecting this. To be honest I feel like I just got suckerpunched, then thrown into a fucking whirlpool, so right now the only thing I want is to find the nearest bar and get very, very drunk. You’re welcome to join me, or to tell me to fuck off.”

The kid shakes himself out of his stupor, and stands up.

“Getting shitfaced sounds like an excellent idea,” he says, too quickly, but Buggy ignores it just as he ignores the tears tracks on the boy’s face.

Some things should not be commented upon.

* * *

They get very, very drunk that night, and maybe Ace asks about his father, in a very quiet voice, very late when they’re walking back to the Piece of Spadille, and maybe Buggy tells him about the man that was more of a father to him than his own, and maybe Ace tells Buggy about growing up with Garp and the bandits and believing that he shouldn’t have been born and maybe Buggy tells Ace about Loguetown and Shanks and getting to Baterilla too late to change anything, and maybe Ace tells Buggy about Luffy and how Shanks saved his life and maybe they wonder how a world so big can also be so small sometimes.

Maybe. But if Ace did, and if Buggy did, none of them will ever tell a single soul about it. Ace leaves with his crew the next morning, still hungover and red-eyed and with Buggy’s denden number on a worn vivre card, and Buggy regroups with his own budding crew on the other side of the island and doesn’t answer any of Mohji’s worried questions.

As soon as the Big Top leaves the island, Buggy heads straight for his cabin and gives strict instructions not to be disturbed. He locks his door, crouches next to his bunk and opens a drawer. He takes the fake bottom out, then frees two Den-Den mushi from the habitat built inside it. One is a normal one, the other is white. He hooks them together, then rings a number he knows by heart.

“ _You have reached the Red-Hair pirates, providers of mayhem and parties!”_ Someone greets him gleefully on the other end. “ _What can we do for you today?”_

“Hey.”

There’s a pause on the other end of the line, then the sound of shuffling and of a door closing.

“ _Buggy? Are you okay?_ ” Shanks asks.

Buggy is very much not okay. At all.

“Can we meet?” He says instead. “There’s something you need to know.”


End file.
